Images inevitably carry with them the artist’s meaning; if this meaning is not seen, it is lost. A new art exhibit entitled Understanding Place in Culture: Serigraphs and the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge is a collection of indigenous artists’ work; the meanings behind the work can help the person viewing them understand the world and everyone’s place in it.
Photos of a river or a mountain contain that artist’s understanding of their world and how they tie into it. Physical spaces visited in the artists’ lives and their cultural roots are contextualized in this new exhibit.
“The images act as a window, opening into different understandings of place,” says curator Shelby Richardson. “Their understanding of that land is intricately tied to cultural continuation and knowledge, and the way in which people interact with the world around them.”
According to Richardson, the images in the exhibit communicate the true diversity that exists among indigenous individuals who have been treated and portrayed as one entity.
“I have a really hard time blanketing over indigenous people and how they work,” she says. “It’s so individual to each community, and each person in the community. I’m just saying that this is a way to look at such things in terms of working together, just as the prints are acting as a window of exchange.”
The unique views of the indigenous artists displayed offer insight into our blanketed views. Audio of the artists’ voices is paired with some of the images to bring the viewer the full experience of the spiritual place in which the artist made the piece, so the unique perspectives of the individual indigenous artists who created the works can be fully experienced within the viewer.
“What I’m trying to do in the exhibit is to create windows of exchange between different peoples. I’m trying to create a way for someone to come into the gallery and look at these images and think differently about how they contextualize place,” says Richardson.
Housed in the McPherson Library at UVic campus, anyone can go and look at the free exhibit. This intellectual space’s identity is being challenged to accept a new way of sharing knowledge other than the traditional way at universities: through books. We have to learn from each other and be creative instead of being stuck in our paradigm of existence, says Richardson.
“You’re never going to know everything,” she says. “It’s about opening our eyes to different ways of viewing and understanding place.”
Understanding Place in Culture
Until January 28
UVic Maltwood Art Gallery
uvac.uvic.ca